A variety of websites to put a smile on mom's face

Raising a geek has its challenges. Just ask your mother who could only shake her head when you straightened out your Slinky. She also had the patience to carefully and methodically peel the stickers off your Rubik's Cube to rearrange the color sequence after you messed it up and couldn't figure out how to solve the contraption. Your memory bank is probably filled with such shenanigans, along with loving gestures, like decorating a birthday cake to look like R2-D2 and finding Star Wars themed party favors to match.

Baseline, performance, and ultra PC builds!

What time is it? It's time to Build a PC with our Blueprints! This month, we've built three rigs at three approximate price points: Baseline, Performance, and Ultra. Baseline gets you a powerful system for gaming and content creation at 1080p, Performance beefs everything up across the board, and Ultra lets the dogs out.

3 free and easy tools to transfer your data from one drive to another

You just bought a brand new shiny SSD and want to throw it into your aging mid-tower PC. But wait, the horror of having to reinstall Windows again and all of your applications begins to set in. If you don’t want to deal with the hassle of reinstalling Windows, you can use a simple cloning utility to clone your old drive to your new SSD. We’ve rounded up three free cloning utilities that are easy to use so you don’t have to go through the effort of reinstalling your OS and applications all over again.

It's hands-down the best upgrade money can buy

Over the years, we've upgraded every nook and cranny of our rigs, from major parts like GPUs and CPUs, to minor things like trying different thermal pastes and swapping out case fans in an attempt to squeeze a few more degrees out of a rig's ambient air temperature. It's a bit OCD, we admit, but the point is, we've tried everything, and usually we're only able to see a small gain from our investment of time and elbow grease. That is not the case with SSDs, which deliver an eye-popping, profanity-inducing speed increase for relatively little cash outlay. If you've heard the hype about SSDs, we're here to tell you two things: First, the hype is real, and second, you need one in your system.

Note: This article first appeared in the February 2014 issue of the magazine.

Showcasing the sexiest, most photogenic game screenshots this side of the Internet

We've got our Rig of the Month feature for amazing case mods, but what is a graphics afficionado supposed to do with his or her stellar screenshots? We've got you covered with Graphics Porn. Every month, we'll be collecting and publishing the most beautiful, photogenic, and amazing screenshots submitted by Maximum PC readers.

It’s time for some hardware spring cleaning!

Spring is in the air and it’s time to do some spring cleaning. This means cleaning your house, room, and most importantly, your PC! Of course, keeping your PC clean isn’t just a matter of aesthetics; it also helps keep your system from overheating.

It's heavy, huge, and incredibly handsome

It always impresses us when free time translates into something amazing. Sean Stebor had some free time, and decided to create something different. His vision was for something "bigger than an average ATX case," and something that "would make a statement." Either way, it's badass enough for us to crown it this month's Rig of the Month.

Six cutting-edge gaming mice. Which one belongs in your paw?

We tend to think of some PC components as having a longer shelf life than others. A video card gets out of date faster than a motherboard, which gets out of date faster than an optical drive, for instance. Some people think that a mouse falls way down at the bottom of that list, somewhere between a power supply and the screwdriver you use to put the whole thing together, but those people have got it all wrong.

Note: This article was originally featured in the January 2014 issue of the magazine.

Crowdfunding sites have made it possible to raise money for a business venture from your computer. While Kickstarter is king in this realm, there are other noteworthy alternatives. We kick the tires on three of them

What do Bret Easton Ellis, Ricki Lake, and Whoopi Goldberg all have in common? Believe it or not, they have all successfully launched projects through Kickstarter—the world’s largest crowdfunding site. They’re not alone, either; since the site first debuted in 2009, more than 5 million users have made donations, funding over 50,000 individual ventures that otherwise would never have seen the light of day. It is fair to say that Kickstarter has been a modern phenomenon, helping to fund a wide variety of different projects, from video games to fashion labels and even multi-million dollar feature films. It truly is an entrepreneur’s playground.

Note: This article was originally featured in the January 2014 issue of the magazine.

Make your Windows XP-using friends/family members read this important PSA

Microsoft has officially pulled the plug on support for Windows XP. That’s it. Finite. Done. No more. Don’t expect to see any future patches, services packs, fixes, hotfixes, critical updates, anything — if you’re one of the one-fourth of desktop users or so who are still running the antiquated operating system (yes, there’s that many of you), you’re about to enter the Wild Wild West of computing.